My buddy Chris and I go all the way back to Blue Vengeance, an independent cop action movie I worked on for one day back in 1986. Through the years, I crewed for him on a number of his other indie movies, eventually moving up the chain to writer/producer/DP/actor/editor/post-production sound guy and whatever else needed to be done guy.

(If you want a full, madcap accounting of our early career you can check out my book Film is Hell, which is available on Amazon and also as a Kindle E-book. ((ED: Shameless plug Matthew))).

Sometimes as a film ends you can feel every member of the audience asking themselves; "what the hell just happened?"

This is usually a Michael Bay film issue where you question how such a pile of tosh ever managed to find funding. Luckily, at the other end of the shock spectrum, there is the Post David Fincher film reaction, often resonating after his new features.

The director who, in his thirty year career, has given us Fight Club, Seven and The Social Network brings us the hotly anticipated adaptation of Gillian Flynn's best-selling novel Gone Girl.

When a screenwriter pens a successful and well-known film, they are often given the change to direct his next writing project. Jeff Baena, the co-writer of I Heart Huckabees, directed by Academy Award-nominee, David O. Russell, has turned his attention to Life After Beth. Whilst merit must be given to his drive and dtermination, there is something lacking in this film. It should be overtly brilliant, but it isn't. It’s simply satisfactory that grabs the attention from time to time, but doesn’t do enough to intrigue the audience due to the lack of pizzazz, zing or zest.

Earlier this year, in our monthly stop-motion binge, we discussed the absolutely phenomenal short The Maker; a story of a strange creatures race against draining time fom Zealous Studios. With a film of this calibre you are compelled to go over the studios full body of work for similar gems. On doing so, I found another brilliant short. Made with the same outstanding animation as The Maker and with a great moral centre that asks if our life is predetermined from the moment we are born.

Slick con-man Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) is saddled with the task of transporting 9-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal) to her aunt’s home in Missouri. Addie, it turns out, is a supremely clever girl. She quickly gets wise to Moses’ larcenous ways and demonstrates a genuine (and perhaps inherited) gift for running his con; they temporarily delay her journey and move from town to town selling overpriced Bibles to new widows. Director Peter Bogdanovich gives their nefarious dealings and developing relationship a tart but never astringent tone — and gets a stupendous performance from Tatum (who remains the youngest person to win an Academy Award). Director of photography Laszlo Kovacs, who would ultimately work on six of Bogdanovich’s films, gave a lovely, high-contrast look to this evocation of Depression-era America. The car scene below, a deceptively complicated moving single-shot, took a day and a half to shoot.

Shorts on Tap continued again last night. The event that brings together film makers and film lovers to celebrate a collection of shorts. For this gathering, Rocket Science Choice, the films all had a science-fiction theme with Zombies, Aliens and viral outbreaks all present. Audiences were treated to four new shorts with three of last month's event best.

Perhaps without knowing it, Philip Seymour Hoffman left us on a poignant note. He did so in the form of Gunther Bachmann, the endearingly haggard protagonist of A Most Wanted Man. In reality, there are many people responsible for the quality of this film, but the big three in question are Hoffman himself, Anton Corbijn in the director’s chair and the author of its source material, John le Carré. The film is instantly recognisable as the latter man’s work and it is his typically charged narrative style, in tandem with Hoffman’s performance, that make A Most Wanted Man such a vital film.